The new kosmische electronic shoegaze duo of Ariel Engle (Broken Social Scene, Patrick Watson, La Force) and Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion). Longtime friends, collaborators, and stalwarts of the Montréal post-punk community, this is their first full-fledged project together. Mixed by Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) and featuring guest players Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt Zion, Big | Brave) and Liam O’Neil (Suuns).

AH_ML weaves these 2 unique voices through lustrous tendrils of blown-out tones and drones, expanding on Menuck’s eponymous modular and analog synth-based work of recent years, now imbued with an additionally searing, soulful warmth and melodicism through Engle’s singing. “Darling The Dawn” is a spellbinding album of preternaturally genre-bending sonics and songwriting: a sort of electronic shoegaze suffused with freak-folk, kosmische, darkwave and post-industrial, flowing from ambient minimalism to pulsing maximalism, conjuring traditionals sung in the haze of earliest light accompanied by overdriven circuit boards powered with ungrounded wires.

Above all it’s the singing and lyrics, in method and melodic delivery, that conjure certain freak-folk furrows. As the album title suggests, sleepless anxiety/euphoria and a sense of somatic channeling is vital to these songs.

“Darling The Dawn” captures a wholly compelling collaboration between Engle and Menuck in an album of genuine thematic power, thrumming with alternately tender and serrated beauty as only their combined strengths and sensibilities could conjure.

Eric D. Johnson rarely lingers at one location too long. A sense of place is a unifying theme he's revisited with Fruit Bats throughout its many lives. From the project's origins in the late '90s as a vehicle for Johnson's lo-fi tinkering to the more sonically ambitious work of recent years, Fruit Bats has often showcased love songs where people and locations meld into one.

Those pathways extend straight through the newest Fruit Bats album, aptly titled A River Running to Your Heart. After two decades of making music, hard-earned emotional maturity has seeped into Johnson's songs, resulting in a more complex sound that's connected with audiences like no other previous version of Fruit Bats. A River Running to Your Heart represents the fullest realisation of that creative vision to date.

Lead single "Rushin' River Valley" is a self-propelled love song written about Johnson's wife that clings to the borrowed imagery of the place where she grew up in northern California. Then, there's the gentle and unfussy acoustic ballad "We Used to Live Here," which looks back to a time of youthful promise and cheap rent. But the wistful "It All Comes Back" is perhaps the most stunning and surprising track on the album, Johnson's production skills on full display. Built upon intricate layers of synths, keyboards, and guitars, it's a pitch-perfect blend of tone and lyricism that taps into our shared apprehensions and hopes for a post-pandemic life. It's the kind of performance that makes you hope Fruit Bats stays in this one place, at least for a little while longer...

“Everyone’s hoping that nobody sees/all our little efforts at dignity”

This last line of the title track from Cindy’s fourth LP Why Not Now? works as a slogan for Karina Gill's evolving musical vision. Her music is simple out of necessity and introverted in delivery, but the songs contain vivid worlds and are quietly ambitious.

Gill worked alongside original keyboardist Aaron Diko to develop the songs and they enlisted players from the ever-blossoming SF pop scene to realise her minimalist vision -- members of Flowertown, Telephone Numbers, April Magazine, Famous Mammals, and Sad Eyed Beatniks to name a few. The collective sounds fill out the record perfectly with John Cale-esque viola on ‘August’, lo-fi fairground organs, and a tasteful full-band sound that crops up throughout. ‘A Trumpet on a Hillside’ is the most triumphant Cindy has ever sounded, all ascending chords and a wedding march melody tumbling out of an old synth. Still, some of the best moments are Gill alone, as on ‘Playboy’, just naked guitar and voice, and when the forlorn whistling solo kicks in, it feels like the loneliest star is imploding in a distant galaxy.

While the dream-pop tag is probably still relevant, this isn’t algorithm-fed genre ambience. Gill’s vocal / lyrical presence can be as gently momentous as Leonard Cohen or as intellectually potent as any ’79-’80 Rough Trade post-punk. Cindy’s Why Not Now? is that muffled street symphony inside a passing daydream.

For fans of Sarah Records, Galaxie 500, Algebra Suicide, Mazzy Star, early Low.

Strange Strangers is the follow up to We Are Inextricable and features Delicate Steve (Anti) on guitar & Ada Roth (his fiancé) on backing vocals.

Church was, for many years, a multi-instrumentalist, co-writer and producer of the dreampop duo Exitmusic, whose album, Passage, Pitchfork described as “insurgent, cinematic, and sometimes brilliant.” In 2018, the same year that Exitmusic released its swan song, The Recognitions, Church released his solo debut, We Are Inextricable, which employed the textural electronic elements he had harnessed during the Exitmusic years in the service of a songwriting style rooted in the folk rock tradition, with deep nods to Cohen & Dylan.

The album’s opening track, “This is Paradise (But Not For Us),” is an ironic complaint sung by an itinerant Adam & Eve to their absent father, a kind of gnostic protest ballad in waltz time. It sounds as if Apollo-era Eno had wrested the controls (and the handgun) from Phil Spector halfway through the recording of Death of a Ladies Man. The atmospheric elements of Church’s past productions are sublimated throughout the album, put into the service of tape-saturated vocals, combo organs and guitars. His voice, grown more confident and understated since his debut, still ranges from a laconic Lee Hazelwood hangover to a smoky Tom Waits growl, but it smooths out nicely on tracks like the intensely melodic and propulsive ”Flashof Lightning in a Clear Blue Sky.” Angelic backing vocals by Church’s partner, the artist Ada Roth lend an aura of dreamlike lightness in contrast to the baritone of the album's world-weary narrator.

Secret Stratosphere finds William Tyler and fellow psychedelic dreamers The Impossible Truth refashioning prime cuts from the Nashville guitarist's rich catalog, casting new light onto once-familiar songs. Featuring the crackling combo of Jack Lawrence (Raconteurs, Dead Weather), Brian Kotzur (Silver Jews, Country Westerns), and Luke Schneider (solo, Margo Price), the quartet stretch the dynamics of Tyler's compositions to their fullest interdimensional potential, exposing a deep undercurrent of kosmische and post-rock influences (with the right amount of grit from the nitrous corner of the Dead Lot).

In teasing these influences out on favorites and new songs alike he cheekily calls closer "Area Code 601" a "Hawkwind meets Charlie Daniels Band number" before sending the crowd home on a previously unreleased stunner that lives somewhere between mind-expanding prog and beer commercial–backing Southern rock Secret Stratosphere confirms William Tyler's place as one of our most brilliant guitarists, bandleaders, and composers.

A Rothko-esque color field set to music, The Window Is The Dream ventures even deeper into Horn’s inner space than her stark, acclaimed debut Optimism, which earned her an ‘artist to watch’ tag from The Guardian upon its release last year.

For her second record, Horn travelled to upstate New York to record with a few musical touchstones in mind: the electro-primitivism of the Silver Apples, austere rhythm kings This Heat and The Raincoats’ time-bending Odyshape, however the resulting 10 songs are an entry into a world which is very much her own.

“Her voice is just transfixing” - NPR Music

Over the past 20 years, The New Pornographers have proven themselves one of the most excellent bands in indie rock. The group’s ninth album establishes them alongside modern luminaries like Yo La Tengo and Superchunk when it comes to their ability to evolve while still retaining what made them so special in the first place. A dazzling and intriguing collection of songs, Continue as a Guest finds bandleader A.C. Newman and his compatriots Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, John Collins, Todd Fancey, and Joe Seiders exploring fresh territory and shattering the barriers of their collective comfort zone. Themes of isolation and collapse bleed into this album, as Newman tackles the ambivalence of day-to-day life during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Newman says that Continue as a Guest’s title track also addresses the concerns that come with being in a band for so long.

Newman discovered new vocal approaches within his own talent. There are new and rich tones to his voice, from his dusky lower register over “Angelcover” to his slippery slide over the glimmering synths of “Firework in the Falling Snow,” to bold tones he embraces on the soaring “Bottle Episodes.” Along with Newman’s usual collaborators, several songwriters contribute. The bursting opener and first single “Really Really Light” is a co-write with Dan Bejar (Destroyer, the New Pornographers). Then there’s “Firework in the Falling Snow,” a collaboration with Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13. Even as Newman embraces a collaborative spirit more than ever, Continue as a Guest is a testament to his ability to discover new artistic sides of himself. And it’s in that spirit that Continue as a Guest sounds like a thrilling path forward for The New Pornographers, with songs that generate a contagious feeling of excitement for the future as well.

Trapped Animal Records is proud to announce Cambridge band, Tape Runs Out's debut album, Floodhead.

Floodhead is an exploratory sonic journey from the mind and soul of long-time band leader, Liam Goodrum-Bell (guitar, vocals). Tape Runs Out’s experimental sound comes in part from their excellent array of instrumentation - the band members bring violin (Clare Myerscough) and the hammered dulcimer (Ellie Winter), as well as bass (Takeshi Kanemoto) and drums (Laurence Moore). Recorded and produced by Liam and Dan Dawson (band’s guitarist) at Dan’s home studio over the course of a year, the album thrives off experimenting with different textures and sounds, with each song seeking to be its own microcosm of creativity, delivering its unique part within the whole. The painstaking detail and time spent by Liam and Dan between the initial recording session during the summers of 2021 and 2022 has resulted in an incredible production, and one that takes the listener through the Tape Runs Out universe.

The first single from Floodhead, Souvenir, made God is in the TV's track of the week and was heaped praise on by Steve Lamacq on his BBC 6 Music afternoon show and new music fix.

The undisputed kings of garage rock are back! It’s been 22 years since the last Headcoats album, but now Billy, Bruce, and Johnny return with a brand-new studio album! Recorded last year at Ranscombe Studios in Rochester. Billy, Bruce, and Johnny kindly answered some pertinent questions...

You got back together recently as Thee Headcoats Sect to make the ‘Tribute to Don Craine’ EP. What was it like working with each other again after all this time?
BILLY: It was 'fab' and 'gear.' BRUCE: The weirdest thing for me was how weird it wasn't. It was like time compressed, but to the 'good old days', early on. I was wary that it 'wouldn't be like Thee Headcoats', but it was. JOHNNY: I'm with Bruce and Billy on that one. I think we were all surprised how it all just worked. If I remember correctly, we kicked off role playing like we detested each other. Then we got started and well, you can hear the result.

What were the first songs you ran through when you got in the studio?
BILLY: That’s a very good question. No idea. BRUCE: I can't remember. They all sound the same to me. JOHNNY: Bill had stuff on his phone that went “KSSHHCCCKSSHHHH”! So, we did that first.

You’ve also paid tribute to Don with a track on the Irregularis album – ‘Oh Leader We Do Dig Thee’. He was, along with the other members of Downliners Sect, a big inspiration to Thee Headcoats. When did you first become aware of his music and what was he like to work with?
BRUCE: We were given (or possibly lent) a reissue of the Sect's first LP around 1977, marketed as 'Punk From The Vaults', which certainly floated our boats and definitely popped our corks, due to the somewhat aggressive yet carefree nature of the tunes and sound in general. Ollie, our old bassist, found an ad in a trade magazine for them with a contact number for a Michael O'Donnell, which I excitedly called almost immediately. T'was none other than Don his'self and we managed to convince him into venturing down to Rochester to record some tunes with us which became the first Headcoat Sect EP. We were fairly starstruck and presented him with a brand new 'dearstalker' (or 'Headcoat', as they were now known). He was very accommodating and a great laugh and spent the evening with us, regaling us with tales of yore. I recorded a lot of it on cassette, which I may still have somewhere. Gawd bless Don.

The second album by DJ Black Low builds on his first release with more vocalists. RIYL: Jlin, DJ Rashad, DJ Maphorisa. There’s more than a hint of ambition on the double LP sophomore effort from Sam Austin Rabede.

Pretoria, South Africa-born and based, the young man makes amapiano with new ways of expressing this local turned-global style of dance music. In DJ Black Low’s musical imagination, the songs manage to smoothly vacillate between dreamy and firmly-grounded. Adorned with vocalists across most of the twelve tracks, there’s a new dimension to Black Low’s now-signature approach to abstract, angular deconstruction of the rhythmic developments in his songs. The album references influences and ambitions in its song titles and lyrics while the music itself is anthemic in its sonic and structural aspirations. On many of the songs a slow-burning tension transforms into something unexpected until you’re somewhere else as the track concludes.

There is an emotional and compositional maturity that builds on his earlier work. Vocals and lyrics are in focus. Production collaborators among Black Low’s Gauteng Province circle add to the constantly churning array of ideas that populate this consistently surprising release. Despite being a relative newcomer, DJ Black Low is onto something here. 

David Tattersall, the Wave Pictures guitarist and frontman, releases a solo album of interpretations of John Fahey tunes, recorded live in the studio. Tattersall says "Of course, Fahey is an important cult figure in the history of music: as the first man to find a language for steel string guitar that can stand proudly alongside the established tradition of nylon string classical guitar; as one of many men who rediscovered obscure old blues musicians and recorded them for a new generation in the 1960s; as one uniquely able to reconcile 20th century avant-garde music with folk tradition; as an early indie- label DIY pioneer.

For me personally, Fahey went beyond technique, and to some extent beyond historical or intellectual justifications for his work. He explored his emotions through his instrument of choice, and in so doing made the case for the guitar as the ultimate conduit for emotional expression. While there are many imitators who try to play ''like Fahey'', I avoided using his fingerpicking style or sense of rhythm, and tried instead to use his music to explore my own emotions, my own dreams and memories. I was more interested in the lyrical and expressive aspects of Fahey's music than in the techniques of it. I tried to find myself within his compositions and without composing anything I feel that I have managed to make a David Tattersall record that says as much about me as any of the many albums that I have written.

I think Fahey was a genius of the kind that creates a whole genre single-handedly. There could be thousands, millions, of reinterpretations of his compositions. In fact, there probably already are. And long may this continue. All tracks were recorded live with no tampering."

One of Rio de Janeiro’s most exciting singer-songwriters of the last fifteen years is now living in Los Angeles, where he stands on the verge of an overdue American breakthrough. Before the move, Latin Grammy nominee Rogê (pronounced haw-zheh) was the prince of Lapa, the bustling downtown center of Rio’s nightlife. Charismatic and scruffy, with a distinctively raspy yet boyish voice, Rogê born Roger José Cury—gained an avid following for his swinging samba-funk, tinged with Brazilian Soul. His acclaim rose when he cowrote the theme song for the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil.

Lavishly produced by the Budos Band’s Thomas Brenneck, a top session guitarist and collaborator with the stars (Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Amy Winehouse), Curyman will launch Brenneck’s new label, Diamond West.

For the better part of a decade, LA’s scrappy rock n’ roll mystics Death Valley Girls have used their music as a means of tapping into a communal cosmic energy. On albums like Glow In The Dark (2016), Darkness Rains (2018), and Under the Spell of Joy (2020) the band challenged the soul-crushing banality of modern society and celebrated “true magical in­nite potential” through a collage of scorching proto-punk riffs, earworm melodies, far-out lyrics, and lysergic auxiliary instrumentation.

But on their latest album Islands in the Sky, Death Valley Girls’ songwriting mastermind Bonnie Bloomgarden uses the band’s anthemic revelries as a guidebook to spiritual healing and a roadmap for future incarnations of the self. And while these may be the loftiest aims of Death Valley Girls to date, the resulting music is also by far their most infectious and celebratory.

For fans of Hana Vu, yeule, Tirzah, Yves Tumor, Mitski, Westerman.

Debut full-length from Hong Kong British artist Eva Liu, co-produced with Luciano Rossi, who are both members of the UK indie rock group, Dama Scout. As mui zyu, Hong Kong British artist Liu navigates the tricky territory of ever-changing identity, merging fantasy and folklore to create a stage for self-acceptance and deliverance.

On her debut full-length Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century, Liu utilizes chopped-up soundscapes, delicate industrial ambience and sweet pop melodies to introduce a character, a guide who can be stretched across worlds to offer the catharsis of patience, perseverance and understanding. This isn’t a character formed from a desire to escape or flee the real world, but rather a way to submerge even deeper into ourselves. Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century is a reflection of everyone, and everything, that made us who we are. 

In the fall of 2021, Simeon ten Holt's "Canto Ostinato" was reborn in a 'solo version for seven keyboards'. During the weeks leading up to the birth of his son Lark, Erik Hall moved methodically among the instruments in his recording studio, conducting a multi-track conversation with himself and the piece's score. Ten Holt composed "Canto Ostinato" between 1976 and 1979. The rhythmic motif (ostinato) repeated over its entire length has a limited number of printed notes. It is up to the performers how to play them, for how long, where to place accents, etc. In the score, the composer calls on musicians to interact and evaluate, to fuse sounds and colours into one cohesive musical universe. Then a cosmos is created. You can get lost in that. You want to get lost in that, like in the original live recording with four pianos.

Erik Hall's "Canto Ostinato" lasts for one hour, and from the sheer joy of playing this wondrous composition emerges an elegantly meandering journey. In it, music rises above itself, higher and higher, like a lark jubilating freedom in the sky.

“Shrewd... prismatic... organic...Makes a minimalist standard freshly thrilling to revisit.” - PITCHFORK

“Erik Hall...has made something thrilling and beautiful out of parts so complicated... I think Mr. Reich will approve.” - POP MATTERS 

American songwriter-inventor Thomas Truax joins forces with ex-Slits / Banshees drummer Budgie to produce a gemstone of art-rock, post-punk and surreal Americana. Thomas Truax is (pronounced troo-aks) an imaginative American singer / songwriter and inventor who has been touring and releasing records for 2 decades, usually performing solo with his own ‘band’ of self-made (sometimes mechanical) instruments. His music evades easy pigeonholing as his songs flit between art rock, post-punk, and a distinctive brand of surreal Americana. 

Mother Superior is the third in a series of motorized mechanical drum machines built by Thomas. She’s made primarily from recycled parts including bicycle wheels, hubcaps, spoons, a horn, and other percussive bits. She is widely celebrated for her ability to play steadily and make quite a din. Allusions to dreams are woven throughout Thomas Truax’s 10th studio album Dream Catching Songs, whether they be literal night dreams, aspirations, fantasies or broken dreams.

For fans of: Tycho, Rival Consoles, Ólafur Arnalds, Jon Hopkins, Corre, Baths, Jónsi, Bon Iver.

On Origins Chris Bartels takes on the role of singer-songwriter for the first time under his Elskavon moniker, unveiling a voice that wouldn’t sound out of place next to vocal-forward artists like Justin Vernon, Jónsi, or Baths, who master the balance between conventional songcraft and bold, idiosyncratic experimentation. Origins is vast yet intimate, fluttering yet cohesive, tattered yet clean, a little like rainfall during sunlight.

Shedding the ambient-classical confines of his previous output, the album’s opener and title track, offers a swirling mosaic of acoustic textures that recall the beloved duo The Books, laced with warped vocal utterances flitting in and out of a club-friendly beat. Throughout Origins, the patient glacial aesthetic of his previous work is still discernible. There are wordless, expansive panoramas that stretch out patiently for minutes at a time and smartly resist the impulse to pack each moment with a persona made even more impactful when Bartels chooses to wield it. At other times, his spokesmanship is woven discreetly into a larger tapestry, like on “See Out Loud” (and its ambient reprise) where Bartels’ voice shimmers from a distance, covering the scene in diffuse splendor.

Barefoot On Diamond Road is the third album from Dutch singer / songwriter Amber Arcades. A record of engaging maturity, filled with slow motion builds and epic lifts that elevate it to dizzying heights.

Immersed in an all-consuming wall of sound, Barefoot On Diamond Road is like My Bloody Valentine gone acoustic, it shouldn’t work but it does; it’s a juxtaposition of textures, from skittery, uneasy dancefloor beats to symphonic kosmische, a baroque pop tapestry side-stitched with cellos and harps with a plaintive steel guitar echoing in the distance. Conceived remotely with original sparring partner Ben Greenberg (Danny Elfman, Depeche, Ryley Walker) in New York and Annelotte in Amsterdam. It’s a coming of age set in a new town with a new positivity underpinning her, as ever, beautifully crafted and highly personal observations on life, love and how it all should or could work.

Amber Arcades’ new album Barefoot On Diamond Road marks a new phase for a highly respected musician.

"A Giant Has Nowhere To Go: Tongue Master Records Presents Selections From Comes With A Smile (2000-2006)" is a celebratory vinyl-only release drawn from the magazine's sixteen cover-mounted compilation CDs.

Side one features artists who appear in the Tongue Master discography - from established masters Mark Eitzel, Mark Mulcahy and Howe Gelb to the equally idiosyncratic stylings of New York’s The Scene Is Now, Athens’ Sigmatropic (featuring Edith Frost) and London’s cinematic The Real Tuesday Weld. The latter revisits a CWAS favourite, featuring a newly recorded vocal by Sephine Llo, exclusive to this release. Other contributions include intimate demos from Eitzel and Gelb (better known in embellished form by American Music Club and Giant Sand respectively), to standalone gems like Mulcahy’s “Elephantine” (which gives this collection its title) and the bruised avant-garde blues of The Scene Is Now’s “The Word”. The tracks on side two and the accompanying 7” are a diverse selection drawn from the 16 CDs CWAS issued between 2000 and 2006 that reflect and complement the oeuvre of Tongue Master Records. Here you will find the dense literature-infused art-folk of Lullaby For The Working Class, the sparse acoustic balladry of Nina Nastasia and the curious Matmos-enhanced stylings of veteran polymath and fellow New Yorker David Grubbs.

The 7" presents two further gems: a concise edit of the lengthy title track from a 12” tour EP from The American Analog Set, and an acoustic rendition of a track from the album ‘The Great Destroyer’ by shapeshifting veterans Low from the same year. With full lyrics, a special four page insert tracing the history of the magazine, and an Alex Wharton Abbey Road cut, this quality release is a testament to the legacy of CWAS. ‘Probably the best independent music magazine in the world ‘

Singer-songwriter and composer Laura Loriga was born in Bologna, Italy, and in the past decade she has been developing her work between her own country and the United States.

Laura has lived in Los Angeles and then in New York, and both cities, together with Italy, have created a superimposition of influences that have led her writing to develop in a personal direction. From more abstract and classically infused atmospheres, she has gradually moved towards a kind of increased simplicity and rawness, complemented by an ongoing research in her sound palette, currently based on organs as opposed to the acoustic piano she started writing on. Her music is variegated and enriched by an array of acoustic and electric elements (among which drones, nyckelharpa, harmonium), a series of darker ballads sometimes far from song form but invariably led by her rare and striking voice, a compelling force across all the landscapes through which it moves.

Vever featured collaborations with a series of musicians including Josh Werner (Marc Ribot, Coco Rosie), Otto Hauser (Espers, Vashti Bunyan), Anni Rossi and Janis Brenner (Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble).

Exit North are: Japan co-founder, solo artist Steve Jansen, Swedish singer songwriter Thomas Feiner, pianist Ulf Jansson, and renowned Swedish producer/multi-instrumentalist Charlie Storm. Their 2nd studio album ‘Anyway, Still’ continues the quartet’s appetite for 3 exploring provocative song structures. Weaving classic elements such as piano and strings into the layered threads of the bands material.

Where intimacy and atmospherics give way to powerful dynamics, animated rhythms and grooves, driving distortions and crescendos in cinematic scale. Like excavators with uncompromising autonomy, Exit North relish the exploration of every nuance and detail of the recorded performance. Artwork contains full lyrics.

Everything eventually turns to dust. Everyone knows this, but few want to acknowledge that our time on this mortal coil is fleeting, preferring to remain in stasis, in hopes that "the end" will pass them by. Chicago trio FACS have been perfecting their brand of intense, cathartic post-punk over the course of four ever-evolving albums. Their newest "Still Life In Decay" comes as an addendum to the last album - a "post-event review" if you will. "Still Life In Decay" starts with a squall of white noise before collapsing into the band already locked into a lumbering groove, with Case's guitar a ghostly presence, appearing & disappearing in washes of gauzy feedback throughout the track. FACS have never been more locked in as a unit, and "Still Life In Decay" is a decidedly more focused effort.

The apocalyptic chaos that defined their previous album "Present Tense" is waved away in favor of an examination of events with cumbrous clarity. As a rhythm section, Kalaba & Leger dance & twist around each other like a double helix, forming the DNA of what makes FACS special. Collectively they approach rhythm from outside the groove as opposed to inside it, creating a lattice where Case weaves guitar lines like creeping vines. When the guitar punctures the lock-step swing of "When You Say", it hits like a hammer. Case utilizes his lyrics like a person suffering from anterograde amnesia; repeating phrases & holding onto old memories in a desperate attempt to avoid the slide into oblivion.

Freeform poetic missives touching on themes of resignation, cynicism, class warfare, and a search for identity & meaning in a crumbling society; A primal desire to hold onto anything in a post- pandemic barrage of sensory overload.

On Labyrinth, Heather Woods Broderick serves as our reflective host, subverting expectations of conventional songcraft with impressionistic language and quietly relentless explorations of the human experience that’s at once light and dark, more circular and less linear. Broderick began crafting Labyrinth in March 2020, when most forms of movement were brought to a screeching halt. The Maine-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter who, in addition to her work as a solo musician, built a life playing and touring with acts such as Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton, Damien Jurado, and Efterklang was suddenly forced off the road for the first time in her career.

For all of Broderick’s sage lyricism and vocal authority, Labyrinth never provides the listener with any easy answers. If the image of the labyrinth represents the enormity of modern life and the difficulty of navigating it, Heather Woods Broderick provides a guide to its endless kinetic wonders of being present, aware, and connected despite its disconnects. She describes the texture of its walls, its indifferent rhythms, and the inherent poeticism of feeling lost amid the dead-ends and unexpected turns. At this point in our history, perhaps that’s all we need to keep moving.

"...exquisitely beautiful." MOJO
"...a swooning, whispering delight, impressive..." THE LINE OF BEST FIT

For her austere new solo album, Domestic Sphere, Josephine Foster performs solely with her electric guitar and then subverts the usual range of her voice to embody other frequencies and sounds beyond the surface layer of the songs. She communes so completely with every sound on the record, with the past and the future, animals and insects and birds, those so tenderly dead, and those of us who are alive. Listening to the record is a transcendent experience. It's an exorcism, one that exorcises you.

A seance by song, Josephine channels sounds from her interior and exterior landscapes, whether integrating field recordings reflecting daily life in a Spanish village and other moments in her life as a nomadic musician, or, as in one tender cameo, the voice of her great-grandmother comes from the other side. These songs are vigils, melodies sung intently, to be set aflame and sung off with the wind.

“Powerful and eccentric” Pitchfork
“A dreamily unique talent” The Guardian

London slowcore band deathcrash have announced their new album Less, due March 31st via untitled (recs). Less follows their critically acclaimed 2022 album, Return, with a statement in reduction that turns out to be as powerful and potent as it is tender and introspective.

Less was always planned to be a statement in reduction but it soon became apparent that the songs the band were writing were significant, personal and, despite the intentions to strip things back, bigger. The result is a record that is as powerful and potent as it is tender and introspective, with arrangements that manage to feel refined yet detailed and with a deep emotional resonance at the core of the record. Banks’ voice shifts from hushed whispers to guttural screams, one minute tapping into the kind of fragile beauty that artists like Elliott Smith managed so well, on tracks such as ‘Duffy’s’ before unleashing a doom metal growl in thundering unison with the band on ‘Empty Heavy’.

Recommended If You Like: Boredoms, OOIOO, Blonde Redhead, Guerilla Toss, Rolling Stones, Liars, Marnie Stern, Yoko Ono, Battles.

Did you know that miracles happen every day? We don’t always see it that way. We look at the state of the world and think, “It’ll be a miracle if we make it out alive.” But miracles are what humans do. We’re Earth’s most inventive and unpredictable species, when we’re allowed to be. Also the most destructive. Miracle-Level is Deerhoof’s mystical manifesto on creativity and trust. It celebrates the infinite small wonders of existence that spontaneously present themselves, when not obstructed by our death-driven masters. Musically, Miracle-Level is vulnerable, brave, and brimming with spicy surprises.

Deerhoof’s 19th album is also their first to be recorded and mixed in a recording studio. Production was entrusted to Mike Bridavsky, at No Fun Club in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This is also their first album written entirely in Satomi’s native language. Deerhoof once again speak in a secret code that only their fans understand, in which hooks abound, and genre is nonexistent.

All of us carry a piece of where we’re from with us, but these parcels of fallow land often in a uniquely mysterious way become the prey that nourishes our aspirations. Agnès Gayraud, a refined thinker by day that transforms into la Féline at night, left Tarbes many years ago in search of greener pastures. After making a name for herself with Adieu l’Enfance (2014), Triomphe (2017), and Vie Future (2019), the author and musician has evolved once again. Her latest release reinvents the circle of life and challenges our preconceived notions.

She welcomes us to her hometown with sweet and clear melodies over the backdrop of an electronic hum, reminiscent of Mark Twain classic Tom Sawyer. Tarbes is no more than a listen away. Physically prevented from returning to her hometown by the viral threat we all know all too well, Agnès found her way back with a small Electone home organ. The constraints of off-peak hours that called for some DIY savvy, slowly but surely, roused her spirit. With a drum machine, a bass and a guitar, she succeeded in making the young girl inside her smile again. With 13 songs and just as many adventures Tarbes is a concept album that tells the story of a young woman’s formative years, as spent in her hometown. The returning hymn doesn’t only imprint nostalgia, it paints the full emotional portrait of a town. Because for Agnès, Tarbes is not just her theater, but her whole world, showing how fiercely protective she is of her hometown in the song Solazur. Under a magnifying glass of emotion, and with the sentimental testimony that is La Panthère des Pyrénées, the artiste shows us the skeletons in our own closets. Tarbes, more than a brief stopover in a rail journey to the coast, broaches issues that touch on abandonment, desertification, aging and redevelopment that many French towns and cities face today.

Recommended if you love Mercury Rev, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Radiohead, Deerhunter, Atlas Sound, Stereolab.

Close to 5 years on from their last transmission, Ulrika Spacek resurface from self-imposed exile with their 3rd album, Compact Trauma, a collection of songs that function as a chance treatise of sorts for our current collective condition. With a title like that arriving at this point in time, it’s tempting to interpret the record solely in the context of the global events of the past few years, but the roots of these 10 songs arc back much further in time, charged with their own personalised internal damage.

In its first phase of life, Compact Trauma was a document of a band striving to perfect an idea while the universe around them seemed to want to shut down. And then, at an impasse of sorts and with a record halfway complete, it suddenly did. If Ulrika Spacek were a band in need of the brakes applying, it was the force of a global pandemic that made it happen. As the world stood still, Compact Trauma was filed away, unfinished and unheard by the wider world. The prolonged break enforced by myriad lockdowns may have separated the group but it also afforded them time to reflect on what had already been committed to tape... As the lights came back on and the shutters up, they found themselves drawn back towards Compact Trauma. What they rediscovered was a record that seemed to pre-empt the shared grief of a global pandemic. Addressing existential freak out, displacement, substance reliance and encroaching self-doubt, these highly personalised songs suddenly took on a wider significance, speaking in part to a bigger narrative.

Recommended if you like: Sarah Records, Even As We Speak, The Field Mice, Blue Boy, The Clientele, early Belle & Sebastian.

It’s ok to play out of time. Music toys with time. Or, maybe songs reflect back that time is always toying with us. The world of a song takes hold of us like an eternity to be lost in, with its repetitions and variations, but ultimately, as with everything else, it has a start and then ends. Whereas the 2022 collection Summer at Land’s End was a softer, gauzier world, The Town That Cursed Your Name is heavier, with fuzzed lines running through. 'Leave It All Behind' starts out with an amorphous whine but quickly launches into something both supremely melodic and buzzing at the edges. 'Here Comes the Lunar Hand' is an impressionist geometry that seems to capture the album’s themes without telling you how. Lyrically, Donaldson embraces the earnestness of his heroes Paul Westerberg and Grant McLennan. Sonically, late '80s college rock is filtered through song-forward lo-fi acts like East River Pipe and House of Tomorrow-era Magnetic Fields.

Whether inhabiting the realm of dreams or nightmares, the primordial drive of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs is more powerful than ever and ‘Land Of Sleeper’, their fourth record in a decade of rancour and revelation is testimony to this. Arguably the most potent and assured record of their storied life so far, it’s the product of a band energised and fortified by their individual passions to incendiary effect.
 
‘Land Of Sleeper’ sees the Newcastle-based quintet not so much reinvigorated as channelling a furious drive which only appears to gather momentum as the band’s surroundings spins on their axis. For all that the last few years have seen Pigs’ stature rise in the wake of triumphant festival slots and sold-out venues like, this remains a band fundamentally incapable of tailoring their sound to a prospective audience, rather standing alone and impervious as a monument of catharsis.
 
The better to unite slumber and waking, ‘Land Of Sleeper’ is no less than an act of transcendence for Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - new anthems to elucidate a world sleepwalking to oblivion.

Faten Kanaan's fifth LP Afterpoem is a mysterious, smudgy, bittersweet, and uniquely playful album. Deeply melodic, it continues her poignant exploration of counterpoint as a narrative tool. From the repetitive structures of modern minimalism and early music / baroque influences - to more languid textural ebbs and tides, there's a warmth in her use of electronic instruments that gives the album a curiously timeless feel. Composing intuitively, her music has often been described as 'strange', mostly because it creates its own world- one that isn't easily categorised.

The album's title refers to the haze of a poem's intended meaning being abstractly fleeting and barely graspable. Glistening threads of understanding still touch us - the poetry becoming intimately personal, and no further literal explanation is needed.

For fans of Electrelane, Stereolab and Laetitia Sadier, Cate Le Bon, Deerhunter, Yo la Tengo, Black Country New Road.

Parisian quintet En Attendant Ana have dazzled since day one. From the muted strains of their 2016 EP “Songs From The Cave”, to the assured 2018 Trouble in Mind debut Lost and Found, to the sparkling refrains of “Juillet”; released just before the world collapsed around us, and which stood as the band’s rebirth and purest statement of their music ambitions - until now. Principia is the band’s third album and is without a doubt their best yet.

This album is the first one to have been shaped entirely by the band, from the conception to the production. The meeting of Vincent Hivert and Margaux Bouchaudon gave birth to a duet in which the technical and artistic aspects were intertwined from the very beginning of the conception of “Principia”. The record is a great step forward without sacrificing the things that make the band unique. The nods to French pop (both current and classic) still permeate the proceedings, and the group’s penchant for Anglo-Saxon indie pop from The Nineties (think Electrelane, Stereolab, American Analog Set) still rings out, but there’s an air of - dare we say - maturity in “Principia”s twelve songs. The group always felt a little ‘out-of’ and ‘ahead-of’ its time, but tunes like “Wonder” “The Cutoff” and “Same Old Story” are cinematic and romantic, and absolutely feel like the next great phase of an already great band."

For Fans Of... John Carol Kirby, Pharoah Sanders, Bill Evans, Durand Jones and The Indications, Misha Panfilov.

The debut LP from Okonski features current and former members of Durand Jones and the Indications (Steve Okonski, Aaron Frazer, and Michael Montgomery). The album opens with Runner Up, where a triumphant yet melancholic melody in the piano leads to a more reserved B-section driven by the drums and bass of Frazer and Montgomery. As you journey through the remainder of the album you are met with a plethora of evoked and explored emotions. The calmness one has walking down a moonlit street after midnight, the connection one has for a person who comes into their world for just a moment or a lifetime, and the nerves and catharsis one feels when starting upon a new, unknown journey. Magnolia closes with Sunday, a track that was recorded late into the night at the close of their first recording session. Without the spontaneity of Sunday, the remainder of Magnolia would likely have never come to fruition. Magnolia was composed from the heart and from the spirit of those in the studio those late nights in Loveland. It is the culmination of an emotional and artistic release that was not afforded or recognized before the band sat at their instruments, and because of that it is introspective, meditative, spiritual, and new.

Death Pill, are an all-female hardcore punk power trio of considerable muscle, combining metalcore, punk rock and (like labelmates ‘Shooting Daggers’) oodles of ‘Riot Grrl’ vibe. 

From the classic punk of Black Flag, The Distillers and Circle Jerks, to modern outfits like Axe Rash and the thrash metal of Nervosa and Exodus, there’s a nod to all of this in Death Pill’s visceral sound. That aside, what makes this release even more pertinent for us, and the fact that it is happening at all, is that Mariana, Anastasiya and Nataliya are from the Ukraine, who’s troubles are well known to all of course, but naturally enough have hit the band very hard. 

There is hope for sure, and as this album amply demonstrates, plenty of fighting spirit. It’s a killer debut. However, producing a ‘killer record’ under such extraordinary circumstances was a challenge too. Tracking started during Covid and was completed in late 2021, only three tracks were mixed before the war hit. However the band and their production team were able to somehow continue and finished everything including the artwork in 5 months whilst the Russian invasion rolled on. A testament to their drive and single mindedness. The musicianship and commitment on display is undeniable, plus the tracks on the album have been totally remastered for this release, sounding as fat and full as a raging whirlwind. Although things are uncertain, the band are still strong and still together. 

For fans of Brian Jonestown Massacre, Velvet Underground, TOY.

Dragging the Needlework for the Kids at Uphole is the debut album from Index For Working Musik, released via Tough Love. 35 minutes of repeat phrased guitars, slow-clipped drums and dulcet vocals where the recurring landscape is the desert. Reel-to reel-loops of Afghan music compete with the found sound overlays of voices recorded at the queue of the pharmacy and drum machines borrowed from Spanish heroes, channelling both far-off climes and snippets from a closer reality. It’s a strange psychic brew, built of imagined mysticism and domestic realities, of fever dreams and days that stretched into weeks of months.

“Life, despite all its destructive changes, remains indestructibly powerful and joyful.”

World Of Echo are proud to announce the long-awaited reissue of the self-titled debut album by Bristol’s Movietone. Originally released in 1995 by Planet Records and reissued on CD in 2003, this is the first time Movietone has been reissued on vinyl. An expanded double-LP edition, it includes the extra tracks from the 2003 CD (their first two singles, and an unreleased demo of “Chance Is Her Opera”), and adds three more unearthed gems: demos of “Alkaline Eye” and “She Smiled Mandarine Like”, and an early take of “Late July”, recorded in a garden by Dave Pearce (Flying Saucer Attack) in 1993. Taken together, this is the definitive collection of music from the first phase of one of Bristol’s most remarkable groups.

Movietone was the cumulation of a series of events, explorations, and discoveries, starting at secondary school – the group’s core membership of Kate Wright, Rachel Brook, Matt Elliott and Matt Jones met at Cotham School in Bristol. Full of half-captured memories and entangled abstractions, there’s an elliptical, ruminative quality to much of the writing here that shows the deep influence of the Beat Generation writers, along with a twilight environment captured in the songs that’s pure third-album Velvets, Galaxie 500, early Tindersticks, Codeine.

Movietone would go on to make three fantastic albums for Domino – Night and Day (1997), The Blossom Filled Streets (2000) and The Sand and The Stars(2003) – and their Peel Sessions were released in 2022 on Textile. Still held in high regard by artists like Steven R. Smith, and The Pastels, whose Stephen McRobbie once described them as “one of the great unknown English groups,” it’s an absolute thrill to listen to Movietone anew – still inspired, still seductive, still magic, still mysterious.

For fans of Grouper, Julianna Barwick, Christina Vantzou, Stars of the Lid, This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins.

Hollie Kenniff’s second LP, We All Have Places That We Miss, is a gallery of cloudlike synths, seraphic strings, and humming guitars, all coaxed into cohesion by Hollie’s own wordless singing. The album’s 2021 precursor, The Quiet Drift, landed on Bandcamp’s Best Ambient list alongside the description “...deep tones of drone, dream pop harmonies, and new age’s bright tranquility, Kenniff evokes the forests, lakes and rivers of her past and present surroundings with a zen patience.”

We All Have Places That We Miss transmutes such glimmers into a palpable sonic kingdom that can be revisited at will, recalling the pedal-board ambience of Windy and Carl, Adam Wiltzie, and Liz Harris.